Wow - I'm always amazed at the responses a negative response generates. I have a decent machine - quad, 580, etc. and most every game I play has no problems at max settings. Enter Skyrim. Constant crashes to desktop without error and corrupted saves. This game is nothing short of a piece of crap for me. I see where people (including the ya-hoo above me) run great. Good for them. Does it do me any good they can do hundreds of hours without crash? Nope. I have over 300 hours in the game and I suspect I have 150 crashes behind that. I eventually lost interest in trying out the latest patch to see if anything was fixed and gave up on the game. Maybe a year down the road when they realize what they're doing wrong, it will be worth it. Search the forums and you'll find many of us that are unable to run the game. My wife for example runs great about 80% of the time. She has a little bit less of a system, so maybe they have a leak when you're running everything maxed. I experimented for a bit with settings and I found I could run longer (without the blank crash) if I lowed my settings. Why should I though? I put this sucker together for max power and why the heck do I have to lower my settings to get a game to run? It runs smooth when it's running - it's a matter of keeping it going (I apparently didn't buy the fuel pack for my PC that keeps it running).

Short of this is that most of the games coming out lately are laxed in their quality. Look at that Pegasus game that is lucky to even launch. As gamers, the only choice we have now is to wait till after release, after the first three patches that should have been in the release and till the game sells for half (or $10 on Steam) before it's worth the effort/hassle. I used to pre-purchase games (argh - D3 you kill me). That's a thing of the past for me. Waiting 6 months or even a year on a game now and finding it on Steam for $10 is now my thing. Picked up Fallout New Vegas a couple weeks ago for less than $10. Works fine, includes all the patches I read about that fixed the crashes and I'm good to go. Wished I'd done the same for the piece of crap titled Skyrim.